Legion may have doubled World of Warcraft subscribers

We’ve played and spoken about World of Warcraft: Legion a couple of times already and one of the main takeaways is how good and welcoming the MMORPG now feels after a long drought of stale gameplay. From a peak of more than 12 million subscribers in 2010, last year saw WoW hit a low of 5.5 million. That was the last time developer Blizzard revealed subscriber numbers and decided to never report on these stats again.

Warcraft game designer Tom Chilton did an interview with Polish magazine Pixel that was translated and reported on the NeoGAF Forums. In it, Chilton reveals that Legion helped boost World of Warcraft to its former glory with current subscriber numbers of 10.1 million.

His full quote as translated:

“Currently, [our subscriber number] is around 10.1 million. You know, it’s difficult to say what the future will bring. We have an internal competitor, Overwatch, but it’s possible it’ll get even higher than 12 million. There are plenty of potential takers and there are over 100 million World of Warcraft accounts.”

Gaming news site Polygon reached out to Blizzard for confirmation on the subscriber numbers and Blizzard outrightly shut the news down, calling it “a misquote or some kind of misunderstanding on the part of the journalist”. Blizzard made it clear they will not be sharing any information on subscriber numbers regardless of how high the figure could be at this point.

It’s safe to assume World of Warcraft numbers have gone that high. Blizzard reported 3.3 million copies of Legion sold on launch day and it is the best expansion WoW has had in years. Are you a subscriber? Let us know if you love or hate being back in Azeroth.